Patrick White

You Have To See With Your Heart Into The Nature Of Life - Poem by Patrick White

You have to see with your heart into the nature of life. Your eyes will only get you as far as the front porch. Like a moth drawn to the light. Mesmerized by the brightness but not shining by a light of your own. Crazy moth, no one’s ever wrong it’s just a matter of degree, notkind of right you want to be, the kind that’s blinded by the dazzle of the radiance of your own blazing eyebeamsor the subtler moonrise of the longings that overwhelm you with the haunting sadness of the unanswered nightbirdsthat keep calling out to the stars as you dolike the ghost of a candle at a seance that’s gone outso you can see better into the unknown darkness that is as much behind you as it is ahead. Even

these blue-blooded words bleeding like the eyes of peasants down this page, toys in the hands of the dead they’re buried with deep in the past and not the Rameseum of royal magnificencewe built to last significantly like the starpath of a zodiac yesterday walks on the plank of a straight and narrow tomorrowfor following its own mindstream through this life of half-lights and shadows, the blue-greys and phantom greens of the irises that beatify our pupils with the moondogs of non-denominational, alla prima haloes around the blackholes the visionaries among us who merely dream keep pearl diving into like starfish reaching out for the singularity of love on the bottom that makes them feel as if they were resurfacing with it in another world the same as this one, but unrecognized like a star a dimension ahead of its light as everything passes into future.

Until you feel the lightning root in you like dendritic black matter you transplanted in exile like a flower you brought from homeyou’ll never see your own reflection in the black mirror that shines brighter and deeper than the white one that pales like the world in comparison with the dawn of the sun that shines from within you at midnight.

Until you stop mistaking fireflies along the coasts of consciousness for lighthouses you can navigate byby letting the lifeboat on the shipwreck of life you’re clinging to like a wooden mermaid at the bowsprit take your height above the horizon for the right ascension and declination of the interspatial, non-temporal direction you’re turning into like a headwind without a sail, you’ll always feel like a cult of pleading seagulls winging it in suspended animation in the wake of the rest of your life while the foghorns bellow Jurassically in the tarpits of an alien shepherd moon.

And I won’t blame you if you don’t understand what all these metaphors are trying so hard not to mean as a way of leaving the door open for the light to get out of that aviary you cover every night with an executioner’s hood as if you were judging your voice by the imperfectible standards of the lyrics you have yet sing on the green boughs and dead branches of life that’s always making a comeback like a has-been instead of swinging back and forth like a trapeze artist afraid of heights on your perchas you do when you come before me like a water sylph acting as if you were some kind of pendulous, grandmother clock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, the dust on the windowsill and you bored to death like a comet portending you’re just another dead goldfish in a huge hourglassof quicksand. Don’t let the panic of being youngdominate any stage of your life you’re on tour with at the moment.And don’t insult me by thanking me for something I haven’t given you. Everything’s of equal value when you’re free to be as worthless as you please.